Don't climate "scientists" have a personal bias invested in a certain outcome?

No. That's the argument made over and over again, but it isn't actually the way science works. In the long run, scientists gain kudos by getting the right answer. Despite the arguments of deniers, scientists aren't idiots.

And in the scientific community, the standard is: the more sensational the claim, the more evidence is required. And climate "science" has made some pretty sensational claims

Again, wrong. In some ways, the problem with actual climate science (not what's in the press, real science) is that the effect isn't sensational. The climate scientists are claiming that anthropogenic carbon dioxide has warmed the planet by on the order of one degree-- far too little for anybody to actually personally notice, although well measurable on a statistical basis. That's only a few percent of the natural greenhouse warming (which is well understood, and not at all controversial, even though it's exactly the same physics).

Again, wrong. I've been tracking the predictions to data for several years now, and climate modelling still seems to be pretty good; tracking to well within statistical error. The only people who say it isn't are saying so by cherry-picking data that isn't statistically significant.

But we knew that: if the greenhouse effect didn't exist, the Earth would be a frozen snowball.

The whole idea that cow burps could produce enough carbon to destroy the planet is why so many people deny even the possibility that emitting industrial quantities of carbon can change the climate. It just makes the whole issue sound ridiculous. Methane may be 20 times as powerful a greenhouse gas as CO2, but because of its reactivity it does not persist in the atmosphere in the same way.

Each year worldwide, the methane produced by cud-chewing livestock warms Earth’s climate by the same amount as 2.1 billion tons of carbon dioxide, a little more than 4% of the greenhouse gas emissions related to human activity.

So, here's a way to affect 4% of the problem (not solve, but affect), with no effect on standard of living whatsoever-- it's a small step, but with essentially no cost: cow methane production is of no economically value.

What bothers me, however, is that the article is talking about burps, while the problem is cow emissions. Not all cow methane emissions are burps.

"The Privacy Statement and Services Agreements combined come to 45 pages. Microsoft’s deputy general counsel, Horacio Gutierrez wrote that they are'“straightforward terms and polices that people can clearly understand'.”

The summary is inaccurate, or at least confusing. The summary says "lasers that can shine light over the full spectrum of visible colors", but the article says that this is three monochromatic spikes, red, green, blue, which together appear white. It also says that the choice of colors is tunable... but tunable lasers aren't new.

The summary also implies that it is "a" laser, but the article makes it clear that what they did is make three separate lasers on the same substrate (specifically "three parallel segments, each supporting laser action in one of three elementary colors.")

Not having it would be worse. Nearly all engineering drawing (as well as some additional technical writing) standards require the use of all caps to minimize ambiguity. In those cases holding down the shift key is ridiculous.

Worse for your specific case that most people will never hit. A simple shortcut or custom keyboard could fill that role if needed.

You're right: when you assume that scientists are all biased, and all the actual analysis and results and data and models can be dismissed without the effort of paying any attention to them because you have already decided they're biased, you can indeed draw any conclusion you like.

And then a million people (men, women, children, civilians all) died when the only atomic weapons used in combat were dropped on them. I'd say that balances out Pearl Harbor a bit. I don't think they "got away" with anything.

First, your death count is wrong-- it's high by roughly a factor of five. Second, the deaths from the nuclear weapons were small compared to the deaths from conventional bombings. War kills people. If you're complaining about bombing, complain about that. Third, the estimated death count from the nuclear weapons was about equal to the death rate from five weeks of the war: if the bombing shortened the war by five weeks, it saved lives. Fourth, the Japanese put every man they had into the war effort-- even the farmers. If they war hadn't ended, the number of Japanese starving would have been millions: there was not enough manpower in the form of women and children left to harvest the fields.

But the solar variation is not ten times as much. We measure the solar output. We know that this is not responsible for the current warming because we measure it.

Nobody measured solar output during the Maunder minimum.

You are confusing two different things.

Solar variation is not the cause of the current warming. Got that? Good.

The climate in 1700 is somewhat harder to model. You quoted what I already said, and I see no reason not to just repeat it:

Well, except nobody knowns whether the Maunder minimum even had anything to do with the little ice age, except for the coincidence of timing. The best understanding at the moment is that the little ice age was due to volcanic eruptions:

That seems straightforward. Nobody knows if there's a connection.

Your comment on that post is

We see here a willingness by researchers to rule out conflating factors despite having insufficient evidence. That is IMHO evidence for the bias I referred to.

I don't understand your logic here. Those "conflating factors" in analyzing climate of the 14-19 centuries don't have anything to do with current climate. For that we have measurements of solar activity.

People have been looking for a solar activity/climate connection for literally hundreds of years*. They haven't found it yet. Understanding the connection between the Maunder minimum and the little ice age, if one exists, would be a huge advance in climate science. But it's not really possible to do science on the basis of "here's something we don't know because the data is poor or non-existent. Maybe there is something we don't understand, but we don't even know if there's anything there."

However, here is something to think about. If it were discovered that the solar variation during the Maunder minimum caused the temperature drop of the Little Ice Age, that would make the climate scientists say "oh my god, the highest estimates of warming due to the greenhouse effect are the right ones; it's a lot worse that the conservative estimates."

Because if the Maunder minimum actually did cause the little ice age, that implies that there must be a big positive feedback loop between radiative forcing and climate. The exact size of the feedback look is the main uncertainty in climate. The short term feedbacks are getting to be well understood. But if there's a large long-term feedback-- one that hasn't really kicked in yet-- then the greenhouse effect is really much worse than the average of current estimates.

But, in either case, whether the Maunder minimum does or doesn't explain all or part of the little ice age isn't really relevant to the question of whether we understand current climate, because we don't need proxies for solar activity to understand current climate: we have measurements. Saying "we haven't found a connection between the Maunder minimum and the climate" isn't bias-- it's just a statement of what we don't know.

--

*mostly in the century-long series of studies trying to understand the cause of ice-age cycles.

But the solar variation is not ten times as much. We measure the solar output. We know that this is not responsible for the current warming because we measure it.

You keep repeating that word "bias." The only bias I've seen you refer to is "every organization that produces a scientific result that confirms climate scientific models is biased." As far as I can tell, the only evidence you have for that purported bias is that you don't want to credit their results.

I have a suggestion: consider the possibility that the people who are telling you that all these institutions are biased might, themselves, be biased.

I did. Should have been 0.025%. That corresponds to 0.075 C difference in the case of 300 K.

In either case, though, that's not enough to explain the current warming. Does not explain enough of the current warming to really bother with.

A key problem here is that the real problem is not whether global warming exists or not, but rather how dire and urgent a problem is it? If a significant component of global warming is due to non-human factors,

It isn't.

You just did the numbers.

It isn't.

then that weakens the case for various expensive public policies and remedies such as ending dependence on fossil fuels (which perversely can include valuable market protection for existing fossil fuel providers), various public subsidies, and carbon markets.>

Now you're talking a completey different subject, which is "what (if anything) shall we do about the warming?"

That's a good question to address... but addressing it by saying "the science is wrong, so we don't need to even think about what to do" doesn't address it.

The question of what we should do about global warming has nothing whatsoever to do with whether the science is correct. People are attacking the science to make political points-- specifically in order to not address the question "what should we do about it", because they are afraid that they would not like the answer.